Beauty vs booty

Interesting - or just silly - tag line, I know. We had dinner with some friends at our house last night and had a great discussion based on "beauty vs. booty". Subtitle: Is beauty objective or is it relegated to mere subjectivity ("in the eye of the beholder"). And is something still beautiful when it has become a currency?

The discussion had a broad range. How do various cultures view beauty? Is there an underlying "constant" with beauty that is present in any and all cultures? How does the media promote beauty to a better place? or to a worse place?

Beauty brings to mind words like "unbroken" and "pure". Our eyes constantly look at good things - amazing things - that are still broken and incomplete. Directors can manipulate film to make us long for the scenery on a movie screen more than in real life. We just get bored with reality. Magazine staff can manipulate pictures so that we see beauty in an unrealistic way. We try to live up to skewed images, thinking we can achieve with our bodies (not created by us) something created by man.

Indeed we've lost much of our senses for beauty. Thankfully we still have occasions when we see or hear something and it triggers a specific reaction that we were made for. What is that...is it objective, or subjective?

Beauty is very subjective in that every human finds pleasure in different things. But the acknowledgment of beauty is objective, always a realization that we as humans long for something beyond our imagination and capabilities.